Tuesday, June 15, 2010

At E3 2009 Nintendo announced a new Golden Sun game for the Nintendo DS. Nintendo never mentioned it again until this morning when they showed new gameplay videos at their press conference and said the game would be coming out in late 2010.

Gameplay wise, Golden Sun Dark Dawn is almost identical to the first two Golden Sun games on Gameboy Advance. Battles are all turned based. Dungeons require some puzzle solving to make it through. And the familiar Djinn's make a return too.

Unfortunately Nintendo confirmed Dark Dawn will not integrate with the Golden Sun Gameboy Advance games in anyway. You won't be able to import your Djinn or other items like you could when you started playing Golden Sun Lost Age. You will need to catch all the Djinn again to create the most powerful attacks.

Battles are little changed from the original's battles. You can use the typical RPG options like "attack", "defend", and "items". But you can also use Djinn to attack the enemies. Each Djinn offers a special bonus like "May cause sleep" or "may cause paraslysis", etc. After you've used a Djinn in battle you get the option to combine Djinn into a super-powerful Psynergy attack.

The graphics in Golden Sun Dark Dawn are improved from the Gameboy Advance, but are not the best graphics I've seen on the Nintendo DS. The summons from joining Djinn look really good, but in the dungeons the main characters seem a bit rough around the edges. Nintendo has almost six months until the game releases so hopefully they can clean up the graphics a bit more.